Catholic church condemned for using “blocking tactics” against sex education

Humanist Society Scotland • February 2016

The Catholic church has been condemned by Humanist Society Scotland in a bitter row with the NHS in Scotland over what they call “sinister” plans to open sex and relationships centres in or near their schools.

Sex and relationships education at state-funded Catholic schools has long been the subject of bitter debate – with church officials imposing strict regulation on what can and can’t be taught in classrooms.

In November 2014 Humanist Society Scotland ran a campaign to have guidance around sex education reformed. In their submission to a Scottish Government consultation Humanist Society Scotland highlighted correspondence between Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board and The Scottish Parliament Health and Sport Committee:

“We do have a concern that denominational schools which represents a third of the school estate in this area, may not be providing the same high quality level of SHRE to children, young people and parents. We have no feedback available from denominational schools on what is being taught, what training teaching staff may have had or what involvement parents have had in their children‘s learning. From our own staff that routinely work with schools, we have an understanding that they can be routinely denied access to denominational schools, or can only do so only if key issues, especially matters to do with sexual health and relationships are not discussed with children and young people.”

Now the government has proposed a new set of drop-in sexual health centres – targeted specifically at pupils from denominational schools.

But the body representing Catholic schools has denounced the “underhand” plan as “sinister” and in “direct opposition” to the wishes of parents.

The proposals for clinics have come in the government’s new Pregnancy and Parenthood in Young People Strategy – due to be published next month.

As part of the strategy they have consulted with sexual healthcare bosses across the country – some of whom have hit out at Catholic schools directly.

Bosses at NHS Lothian have said that they see a particular need for such schemes as a result of Catholic schools in their catchment.

They have told the government that sex and relationship education in Catholic schools is “too frequently not equipping young people with the information and access to services that they need.”

NHS Lanarkshire’s sexual health team have also called for council education departments to take a “much more proactive role” in referrals to sexual health clinics.

And – they say – this should include the deployment of free condom schemes, in spite of the church taking a stance against their use.

Their submission reads: “There are ‘significant discrepancies’ in the advice pupils receive in different schools.

“This continues to put the health outcomes of children and young people at risk and puts local authorities in the position of providing unequal goods or services on the basis of religion.”

It goes on to level a criticism specifically at Catholic schools.

“Objective, non-judgemental information and support is very difficult to achieve when we still have state-sponsored segregated education on the basis of religious belief.”

It also calls for an “enforcement” of equal access to sex health information regardless of where pupils are enrolled.

Colin Anderson, senior health promotion officer at NHS Lanarkshire, said that pupils are specifically “at risk” of STIs, unplanned pregnancies and domestic violence if sex and relationship education in schools was inadequate.

Gary McLelland, head of communications and public affairs for the Humanist Society Scotland, said:
“Sex and relationships education is essential to promoting health and well-being. It is a child’s right to access high quality evidence-based sex and relationships education.

“Most parents will be surprised to learn that publicly-funded Catholic schools want to block access to information about reproductive health for children and young people. It’s astonishing that the Scottish Catholic Education Service continue to fight against these important public health reforms.

“We already know, from information obtained by the Scottish Parliament, that health chiefs in Greater Glasgow are alarmed about the blocking tactics used by some Catholic schools.

“With over two-thirds of young people in Scotland claiming no religion, it’s astonishing that the Scottish Catholic Education Service thinks it has any place blocking health services for young people in Scotland.

“In the coming weeks, ahead of the 2016 Holyrood elections, Humanist Society Scotland will be outlining our vision for reform of the education system in Scotland.”

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

You can find out more and learn how to adjust your cookie settings by navigating the tabs on the left hand side.

Cookie Policy

Cookies In Use on This Site

Cookies and how they Benefit You

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites

Our cookies help us:

Make our website work as you’d expect

Save you having to login every time you visit the site

Remember your settings during and between visits

Improve the speed/security of the site

Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook

Continuously improve our website for you

Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer ours service at the price we do)

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

More about our Cookies

Website Function Cookies

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

Making our shopping basket and checkout work

Determining if you are logged in or not

Remembering your search settings

Remembering if we have already asked you certain questions (e.g. you declined to use our app or take our survey)

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Social Website Cookies

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us if , on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.

We use:

Google Analytics

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how here). Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our’s and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites

It may be that you concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.

The cookie information text on this site was derived from content provided by Attacat Internet Marketing http://www.attacat.co.uk/, a marketing agency based in Edinburgh.